Brock Beauchamp

I barely registered it happening, to my recollection. John had to fill me in on the details a few days ago and I vaguely recall something happening but it wasn't earth-shattering to me at the time. We had a bit of back-and-forth during the integration talks but I just considered that part of the process. There was a lot of emotional stock invested in our respective sites. BYTO was dear to me, just as the four writers' blogs were dear to them. It was expected that we'd get a little salty over giving up those sites unless certain terms were met (and, as it turned out, all of our terms were very reasonable, we simply weren't communicating them very clearly).

It specifically mentions Puerto Rican players. No players for other countries?

Does anyone have a list of Twins players who will participate in this year's WBC?

So goodbye, BYTO. Where the dogs of society howled. Five years ago, four bloggers – whose writings were widely shared on the BattleYourTailOff.com forums – gathered their considerable baseball knowledge and passion to form Twins Daily, eschewing their individual sites in favor of a single site for All Things Twins. So goodbye, BYTO. Where the dogs of society howled. Five years ago, four bloggers – whose writings were widely shared on the BattleYourTailOff.com forums – gathered their considerable baseball knowledge and passion to form Twins Daily, eschewing their individual sites in favor of a single site for All Things Twins. Initially, I was on the outside, looking in at this curious experiment and was intrigued, to say the least. The writers were some of the best in Twins country but the site was rough around the edges and the forums were in their infancy. It just so happened that I ran a forum… Courtesy of Nick Nelson, a long-time BYTO contributor, a meeting was arranged with the rest of the Twins Daily founders. We talked ideas, vision, and I was on board almost immediately. After a bit of back-and-forth, we agreed on a plan and began work to fold the Battle Your Tail Off forums into Twins Daily in the next few days. We haven’t looked back since that time. I’m immensely proud of what the Twins Daily forums have become, largely due to the diligent (and, at times, exhausting) efforts of our moderation crew – ashburyjohn, ChiTownTwinsFan, diehardtwinsfan, glunn, nicksaviking, Riverbrian, snepp, stringer bell, twinsnorth49, and USAFChief – and how the forums have complemented the four founding writers. While the front page writers are front and center so often (as they should be), I view the forums as the backbone of Twins Daily and the work those ten perform on a daily basis keeps that backbone from curling in on itself and ultimately snapping in two is vital to the site's continued success. As I’ve said many times when discussing forum policy for Twins Daily, “this isn’t RubeChat”. We expect civil discourse and the moderators are the people who make this site such an enjoyable place to hang out and talk Twins. It wasn’t always sunshine and roses. As some of you surely remember, the BYTO forums were a bit… volatile, to put it kindly. During the transition, we lost many great posters that I still miss to this day, posters who either couldn’t or refused to tone down their style to fit the curated and tempered approach to forums we strive toward on Twins Daily. I’ll never forget the BYTO wiki, the expansive word filters (at one point, we had filters in place for the entire 25 man roster), the meltdown threads, and a certain fella from Alaska who reported me to the FBI for… well, I still haven’t quite figured out why I was to blame for any of that in the first place or what he was going on about in general, actually. There’s a lot I miss about BYTO and I’d be lying if I said I don’t look back fondly at that site whenever I’m faced with the overwhelming desire to really go for the jugular when posting on the forums. But what emerged from that integration was the best Twins forum I’ve ever seen on the internet, and I’ve been participating in Twins forums since 1999, when I found the dedicated ESPN team forum and later, the Dickie Thon Fan Club. We encourage (and, unfortunately, sometimes demand) reasoned, intelligent takes on the Twins and baseball in general. It works. Twins Daily continues to grow year-over-year despite the Twins fielding something that more resembles a clown car than a functioning baseball team for four of the past five years. It’d be easy to congratulate myself and call it a day but I’m not the one who made that happen. All you great posters from BYTO who stuck around (many of whom later became moderators on Twins Daily), all you posters who followed John, Seth, Parker, and Nick over from their blogs, and all you new posters who were first introduced to us through Twins Daily itself, you made that happen. So congratulations to all of you for making Twins Daily what it is today. I also blame you for every headache I’ve had over the past half decade but I’ll save that missive for the ten year anniversary post. On that note, I have a fun surprise for those of you who have stuck with us since the BYTO days. While putting together my notes, I dug into my old BYTO design archives and pulled out the best shirt designs we had over the years. Enjoy. I couldn’t stop laughing when I opened the folder and saw its contents. View full article

Pence is also competent. I vehemently disagree with his politics, but he's competent.

I buy things on iTunes sporadically enough that I don't bother with that strategy, though I considered doing it. Maybe I'll set up an alert on SlickDeals or something so I don't have to think about it much (though I can never get SlickDeals notifications to work *exactly* how I want).

I'd swap Blackburn for Silva. Carlos was actually really good one season. We don't want that kind of stink influencing the other players.

Shut it, you. Looking up the stats, I noticed Mauer had a career year in doubles in 2010. I never noticed that before. Ah, the days of watching peak Mauer swing a bat. That didn't last long enough.

It's well known Mauer had a load of wall-scraping homeruns that season. No PED rumors necessary. Chalk it up as a career year. Happens all the time.

Seems pretty fair and my expectation for Dozier is that he's roughly a 30 homer guy going forward. He's capable of 40 homers (obviously) but I just don't see him as that type of player perennially. But I'm interested how his early season struggles affected the numbers used in that article. Will Dozier struggle to that magnitude again? It's certainly possible but I don't know whether he'll be as bad as he was through April and May again. And I bet his batted ball profiles suffered mightily during that stretch, as he just wasn't hitting the ball with authority (198 PAs, 5 homers, 7 doubles).

Awesome, thanks. Okay, so the only "mismanagement" of Polanco is possibly the 2010 season, when he split the season between two leagues. Given how much Polanco signed for initially, that seems like an odd move. You'd expect a team to hedge their bet a bit with a 16 year old and make sure he gets that additional year, especially one who cost $775,000 to sign. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not terrible mismanagement, just a bit puzzling. It's somewhat unreasonable to expect a team to put too much emphasis on what will happen in seven years when discussing a 16 year old player.

**** it, bought 'em both.

I've been meaning to buy a Steve'n'Seagulls album for awhile. Which should I buy first? They've released two albums.

Yeah, getting that extra option is not hard, particularly in the case of a guy like Polanco. I believe the cutoff is 20 days. Given how little he played, that seemed like a no-brainer.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I *think* Polanco must have been an early add to the 40 man. He was signed at 16 years old. Doesn't that give an additional year of pre-40 man roster time?

Ah, good point. I can't recall if he was an early add to the 40 man.

Sure, which is why I'm not entirely against him starting the season at short. I'm wary of it but given the other options, it's not the worst idea in the world to see if he can hack it at short.

Last season? Yeah, that should have been his final option. But had the Twins not inexplicably called him up in either 2014 or 2015, he'd still have an option remaining.

I'd take Radke over Viola for sure. Viola had a higher peak but it was only two seasons. Radke had six 4+ rWAR seasons with the Twins, two of them peaking over 6 rWAR (and another very close at 5.8). I guess it boils down to "peak vs. career". I'll take career if the peak was only two seasons (which were extremely good, don't get me wrong). Pascual is a bit tougher, though I still probably lean Radke because Pascual played a significant portion of his career in Washington, where he had his best season overall. And Pascual played in Minnesota just six seasons, three of which hovered between bad and terrible. His other three seasons were very good, though. edit: I see we're including time spent in Washington. Then I may give the nod to Pascual over Radke. But it's still a difficult decision. Both Pascual and Viola were horrible pitchers for a long stretch of their careers. The same cannot be said for Radke, whose worst seasons were just a touch below "average league starter".

There is no bigger bunch of snowflakes than the far right. They get their way 80%+ of the time and cry like children with skinned knees the other 20%.

Small sample sizes for fielding are half of a season. Polanco played less than a week's worth of innings between 2014 and 2015 combined. As many of us were hollering at the time, 2014/2015 were complete wastes of Polanco. The front office burned two options for a total of 40 innings played in the field. Had that not happened, we should be asking if Polanco will start the season in Rochester.

Dozier played 289 MiLB games at short and only 47 games at second. MiLB positions are often based on the Peter Principle. Generally, the earlier a guy drops out of a premier position, the less competent he is at that position. Dozier had a chance to stick at short so he was given every opportunity to do so, playing the overwhelming majority of his MiLB games at the position. Despite those chances, he failed at the MLB level. You can repeat those statements for Trevor Plouffe as well. Polanco, on the other hand, has close to a 50/50 split between SS/2B in the minors. Like Dozier and Plouffe, his scouting reports are not optimistic (and, generally, I'd say they're less optimistic than they were for Dozier). Polanco's initial taste of shortstop at the MLB level was... not good. I'm not sure what you're seeing there that indicates Polanco will be an adequate MLB SS. Is it possible? Sure. Lots of things are possible. Is it likely? No. He has a lot going against him. Hell, there are scouts out there who question Gordon's ability to stick at short and he was considered a polished, advanced fielder out of high school. Playing shortstop at the MLB level is really, really hard.

Dunno. Something around 72.5 would make me think. 70.5 seems like a pretty easy decision to me.

I'd take the over on that without thinking about it too hard. I think they clear 71 wins unless everything goes wrong (again). Hell, their adjusted BaseRuns last season was 71 wins and the Twins literally had two good full season players on the roster. This season, it's easy to see at least two or three of Sano, Buxton, Berrios, Rosario, Kepler, et al step up and provide 3-4 win seasons.